On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 21:16 +1100, Les Bell wrote: > >> > If however there's no swap or a small swap, the OOM killer is given a > chance to attack when it hits a runaway process > << > > I don't recall seeing a "runaway process" of this type - presumably > something that's leaking (allocating and not freeing) memory at an > incredibly fast rate on any production system I've been involved with. I > certainly would never advocate configuring a system to have no or very > small swap on the basis that it makes it easier to deal with what is an > exceptional occurrence.
Definitely its leaking, and it tends to become a "runaway process" after a while. But while it trashes your disk and uses up swap, your system becomes unusable, and you effectively have nothing to do, but to reboot In days of today when the RAM sizes are large, having 256MB of swap, or even more than 127MB of swap is probably more than enough. Of course an Oracle installation will tell you otherwise (it wants double the installed RAM) But anyone running high performance servers know that they'd never want any process to hit swap > >> > This was > fixed in an update to OOo, so make sure this is via a stock FC-3 > installation > << > > And I certainly wouldn't advocate configuring a system with no swap just to > mitigate what is obviously a bug; the correct approach is to get the bug > fixed, as happened here. Exactly, but the point is simple - the OOM killer won't get to you and you eventually have a hard lock I see having double the RAM is probably more than enough if you're sticking to old convention, but three times the amount of RAM seems inane > No swap at all, on office workstations, is asking for trouble. I'll be > sticking with the old rule. Agreed. But I just thought I'd point it out as to "why swap can be bad" too... So for LPI purposes, do we agree that its double the installed RAM? Seems like a safe bet :) -- Colin Charles, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.bytebot.net/ "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list lpi-examdev@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
